Typosquatting, which is also referred to as Uniform Resource Locator (URL) hijacking, is a form of cybersquatting which relies on typographical mistakes, spelling mistakes, and other such mistakes made by Internet users when trying to visit a website. Cybersquatters may register typosquatting domains for malicious reasons (e.g., to provide a delivery mechanism for malware), for monetary reasons (e.g., to profit from displaying advertisements, to redirect traffic to third party pages, to try to sell the typosquatting domain name to the legitimate owner, etc.), some combination thereof (e.g., to deploy phishing sites or ransomware), or any other such motivation. Since the cost for domain registration has become relatively inexpensive, cost is rarely a deterrent.
Some web service providers are aware of typosquatting and, thus, may register or monitor many domains that might be used for typosquatting (e.g., common misspellings or typographical errors of an enterprise's name); however, it may be difficult to capture, register, and/or monitor every variation of an enterprise name. Consequently, variations of a domain name may contain both legitimate typosquatting domain names (e.g., those typosquatting domain names owned by an enterprise associated with the domain being typosquatted) and illegitimate typosquatting domain names (e.g., sting sites, fake URLs, or any other typosquatting domain names not owned by the enterprise and owned by typosquatters).